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as a feature of the FYI France ejournal, ISSN 1071-5916, which is
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digital information work in France and Europe -- as part of FYI France
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months by postal mailing a check for US $45, payable to Jack Kessler, to
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--oOo--

Internet in France, 2004

Periodically it is interesting to check out how the Internet "is doing".
So many of us take the Internet so much for granted, now, that we forget that
the vast majority of the planet still does not even use it.

Internet "omnipresence" and "invisibility" are not even facts of life,
yet, in well over 1/2 of the so-very-wired USofA -- as the Howard Dean
presidential election campaign recently discovered, to its very great cost --
and "household penetration rates", and effective use of the new digital
media, are not very advanced at all, in too many other places. Digital
information is getting there, and is a lot further along than it was just a
short time ago, but it's not "there" yet.

So, how is the Internet doing in France?... Latest numbers, from Network
Wizards: their "top 20", as of January, 2004 --

The above are the total numbers of IP addresses which have been assigned a
name: the list is the "Distribution of Top-Level Domain Names by Host Count"
-- and for discussion purposes here I have added in .gov, and China and
India...

There are so many problems with these statistics, as Network Wizards and
so many others have acknowledged and explained, for so long. First come the
definitions of "what is a host?" Then come methodological problems of
"pinging" and of assessing responses. The Internet was not tailor-made for
statistics-gathering. (See: http://www.isc.org/index.pl?/ops/ds/)

And old problems of the "generics" abound: .net, .com, .edu, ..org,
.gov... Breaking these down into "national" categories is one of the most
illustrative impossibilities of The New Globalization: the Internet not only
is international but it is trans-national -- it spans all of the arbitrary
"nation-state" boundaries spawned originally by the old Peace of Westphalia.
The Internet is a sort of giant, and perhaps even the quintessential,
Non-Governmental Organization/NGO.

[See, amid the voluminous international relations literature on
the general point: Keohane & Nye, Transnational Relations and
World Politics (Harvard, 1972) and Power and Interdependence
(several editions), and Nye, The Paradox of American Power : why
the world's only superpower can't go it alone (Oxford, 2002).]

So nowadays there is no telling, really, how many "French" hosts there
are, in those ".net" and ".com" and ".edu" and ".org" categories. It's like
the bad old good old days of the ORTF monopoly in France: when offshore radio
and television stations, "located" officially, in Belgium and Switzerland and
elsewhere, dominated French airwaves. Voltaire-at-Ferney, redux...

And now new trans-national categories are being implemented, in addition,
confusing the statistical picture even more: .aero, ..biz, .coop, .info,
.int, .museum, .name, .pro... no idea how "French", or non-"French", any of
these are, now... statistical cacaphony... But then perhaps our Brave New &
Globalized world is ready for the Demise of the Nation-State, now? Although
so far the new domains are showing tiny registrations: as of January --

Domain

Hosts

Description

biz

16,680

Businesses

int

11,594

International
Organizations

info

8,349

Info

name

217

Individuals

coop

148

Cooperatives

aero

132

Air-transport
industry

museum

9

Museums

pro

2

Professionals

-- and such meager totals perhaps can be ignored here, so far.

And there is, still, the oldest Internet statistics problem, that of
translating "hosts" into "individual users": a single .museum host in fact
can represent hundreds of thousands of individual Internet users. The Louvre
or the British Museum, for example, each with enormous staff and many
thousands of both physical and online visitors, all over the world... while a
single .fr host might represent only one little guy, holed up in a small
apartment in Lille... and said single "Internet user" in fact might own
several .fr "hosts"...

So, how to generalize? What do we know, when we know that there are only 9
".museum" Internet hosts, or 2,770,836 ".fr" Internet hosts? Not a lot,
perhaps...

But comparisons, particularly those made over time, may help:

Rank

1998

2004

%

dom

hosts

dom

hosts

TOTAL

29,669,611

TOTAL

233,101,481

186%

01

com

8,201,511

net

100,751,276

1908%

02

net

5,283,568

com

48,688,919

594%

03

edu

3,944,967

jp

12,962,065

1110%

04

jp

1,168,956

edu

7,576,992

192%

05

mil

1,099,186

it

5,469,578

2250%

06

us

1,076,583

uk

3,715,752

378%

07

de

994,926

de

3,421,455

344%

08

uk

987,733

nl

3,419,182

897%

09

ca

839,141

ca

3,210,081

383%

10

au

665,403

br

3,163,349

2699%

11

org

519,862

au

2,847,763

428%

12

gov

497,646

tw

2,777,085

1570%

13

fi

450,044

*fr*

2,770,836

831%

14

nl

381,172

us

1,757,664

163%

15

*fr*

333,306

se

1,539,917

483%

16

se

319,065

dk

1,467,415

921%

17

no

286,338

be

1,454,350

1654%

18

it

243,250

mil

1,410,944

128%

19

tw

176,836

mx

1,333,406

3201%

20

nz

169,264

org

1,332,978

256%

So, in the six years between 1998's "beginning of the Dotcom Boom" era,
and 2004's "Internet maturity" phase -- the overall rate of increase slowed a
bit, during 2001 and 2002, but then picked up again strongly in 2003 -- a
number of interesting "national" things have happened, perhaps... "perhaps",
given all of the qualifications mentioned above, plus several more...

France, it seems, has added 831% to its stock of Internet "hosts", over
the past six years -- to its stock of Internet hosts denominated ".fr", at
any rate. This growth has been at a rate double that of Germany/.de or the
UK/.uk, and almost equal to that of very well-wired Denmark/.dk.

And yet much more has been done too, apparently, in other places:
Mexico/.mx appears to have added a phenomenal number of Internet hosts, 3201%
over the period -- as have Belgium/.be (1654%) and Brazil/.br (2699%) and,
very interestingly for those in France, their neighboring Italy/.it (2250%).

And the largest gains in all senses, it would seem, may have been achieved
in Japan: where domain ".jp" not only is the leading non-USA "national"
domain once again, but it also has added a phenomenal 1110% to its
already-enormous base of hosts.

Again, the labels are unreliable: plenty of people who are "in Japan" are
hard at work on .mil and .net and .edu and .com sites, and for that matter on
some .fr sites as well, perhaps -- and plenty of people who are physically
located far from the Far East spend plenty of time online on .jp hosts.

But the numbers may be generally indicative, at least: of places where
growth may have been occurring, and where it may have been occurring faster
than others. The Internet in France has been growing, then: faster than in
some places, slower than in others.

Another consideration in assessing Internet statistics, though, is
national population: what point is there in counting "lots of Internet
hosts", in a nation, if there are not "lots of Internet users" there to use
them?

As mentioned already, here, there can be lone individuals who maintain one
or several personal Internet hosts -- and, at the other extreme, a well-used
Internet host may cater to hundreds of thousands or even more Internet users.

The recent numbers here suggest a few startling developments, plus a few
which are distressing:

So France, first of all, appears to enjoy a sort of approximate parity
with some of its European neighbors, now, in terms of total population per
available Internet hosts: 22 people per host, in France, as against 24 now in
Germany, or 16 in the UK.

The remarkable statistic here, however, is that of Italy: which appears
not only to have achieved phenomenal Internet growth, recently, but also to
have done so with a comparatively small population -- so that today there
seems to be one Internet host for every 11 Italians. I'm curious to know how
they've done this?

Then, too, there are the well-known extremes, which have been true for
several years: the heavy Internet concentrations in the Netherlands (5 people
per host), Australia (7), Taiwan (8), Sweden (6), Belgium (7). These folks
are among the "wired" of the world: the most famous long have been the Finns
and the Danes and Norway, where there are 4 people per Internet, and above
all little Iceland, where there are 3 -- "It's cold, in Scandinavia", a
Norwegian friend once explained...

And the "distressing" news? Well, China and India, which together account
for over 1/3 of the world's people now, and which have enjoyed some
phenomenal rates of increase in domestic Internet growth recently, still have
a very long way to go... in spite of all the current alarmist election-year
noise, in the USofA, over "offshoring" and "business product outsourcing" and
"callcenters in Bangalore" and "Globalization" and so on, which supposedly
are going to enrich them both and impoverish the US, overnight...

Any good analysis, and policy, also must add income and other disparities
to all of this population-talk, though. Total national population - per -
anything makes very little sense if only a small minority of that total in
fact have access to the "thing".

East Germany may account for that higher figure of people - per - host
reported by Germany as compared to France: fewer Internet hosts in populous
East Germany than in the wealthier West, perhaps... Mezzogiorno Italy may
have far fewer hosts available than the wealthy North there possesses, too --
and recent improvements in Italian distribution statistics always could
reflect some new national policy to beef up their poorer region?

Anywhere, though, the national population figures can be parsed to reveal
anomalies: the economic backwardness of Andalucia, perhaps, for ".es" -- the
wealth in the Southeast, in the UK/.uk, far over-balancing the rest -- the US
South, and hardcore tracts of its inner cities, and the increasing US prison
populations and "underclass".

And the disparities are not all economic: politics and culture and other
factors can do much to separate masses, anywhere, from the Internet and other
luxuries enjoyed by small elites -- one wonders how much real access there
is, for example, among the 68+ million people of the Islamic Republic of
Iran, now, to the 496 Internet hosts which they have managed to develop
there.

For income disparities at least, though, there are figures readily
available now: the follwing is for various years in the 1990s... This is
basically the difference between income of the richest and that of the
poorest families: the higher the figure the greater the disparity, and the
less accessible an Internet connection might be, if you are poor. In order by
number of Internet hosts in the domain --

"Distribution of Family Income -- Gini index"

So Brazil's position perhaps is weakened: in spite of having many Internet
hosts, and a theoretical ability at least to provide one for every 58
citizens, the fact that Brazil's income distribution is among the worst in
the world would indicate that the poor there perhaps are not "online" -- and
that it may be a long while before the Mexican poor, as well, become truly
"wired".

The US too, though, in spite of its Big Brother status generally in
allthingsdigital -- when .net and .com and the other generic domains get
included, the US position soars into the stratosphere of the above list --
the US may have income disparity troubles too, similar to those of Brazil and
Mexico...

The US anomaly precludes statistical analysis here, in such a short piece:
not only must the various domains dominated by the US and its users be
aggregated together, but extensive US use of overseas hosts -- ".fr" and
".uk" and all the rest -- as well as increasing overseas use of US hosts,
somehow must be divided out.

At a Gini coefficient for income disparity of 41, however, the US cannot
pretend that its "poor" have the same access to any goods and services, very
much including Internet access, which "poor" citizens of France and Sweden
and Denmark enjoy.

Per the above, US income disparities put the poorer US citizen more on a
par with a citizen in India, or China, if not (yet?) as disadvantaged as
someone "poor" might be in Mexico, or in Brazil... And current fiscal and
other policies appear to be increasing the rich / poor divide, in the US.
Income disparity is not the only source of disadvantage, so in other social
and political areas the US still may be ahead of some; but it does take
money, to use the Internet.

So, interesting statistics... France comes out well in 2004, I think: not
among the world leaders in Internet growth, any longer, at least on a
percentage basis for "host" development -- with the notable exception of
Italy, that position seems reserved now for the non-US and non-European
nations, particularly Japan. But France still is providing well for its
population: both in terms of the number of Internet hosts made available, and
in the economic access of the average French citizen to them. Some are doing
better than France; many are doing considerably worse.

My greatest hope is that others here will become interested in all of
this, and either will direct me to recent analyses which fully answer all of
the questions posed here, or will undertake such analyses themselves... As in
all things digital, there is too much data available now about all of this:
the challenge is to ask the right questions of it, I believe -- and I don't
see those questions being asked too often, myself.

--oOo--

FYI France (sm)(tm) e-journal ISSN 1071-5916
*
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